I found this relatively neat Adobe web page for creating web banners. You enter the text and choose a font and colors and effects and it generates a GIF banner for you. The only thing it lacks are a good choice of heavy fonts suitable for larger banners (light fonts look too thin when you blow them up to bigger point sizes). Well, there's a general lack of choices, though enough for variety. And it's free.

One Mac OS X program I looked at is eClick, from Kinetic Creations. It's a well done and simple application for creating button images. You just pick a button style (from dozens), color and brightness, font and style and size, and shadows, then export it to PNG, JPEG or PICT. Not quite the same as the Adobe site above, as that is for banners so there are more effects available. Two problems with eClick. One is that they don't support GIF files. Their excuse is that the GIF license is too expensive (which I don't think it is for shareware, like $500). PNG is still a year or two from being a universal standard (mostly because by then older browsers that don't support PNG will be a smaller and smaller percentage of total browsers). JPEG is not really suitable for simple graphics and PICT is Macintosh only. The second problem is the $30 price, which is kind of pricy for an application that does one simple thing well.

The reason why I wanted a banner generator was that I finally took a couple of hours to add the "A Necessary Evil" video captures to Tartan's site. 105 pictures, for which I had to generate 105 previews and build the web pages. That was relatively easy, if time consuming. The harder part was that Tartan uses GIF images for the titles. There is no GIF image for "A Necessary Evil" and since I don't know the parameters or even what application he used to generate the titles in the first place, there was no way I was going to duplicate the style. Therefore the sensible solution is to regenerate all of the titles with another program.

I think the new titles came out nicely. I used the Adobe banner generator using the "Brush Script" font, Beveled, at 24 point size, color #CC0000 (a medium bright red). The size is close to the original titles, the color is a little lighter, the letters are not bold and heavy enough, but it does ok I think. More of an understated elegance. More my style than Tartan's.

I have to avenues to pursue with Tartan's site. More video captures, including movie captures; and more official images. For the movie captures I need something to capture it with. Either software so I can take it from a DVD (for the couple of DVD movies that I have) or hardware to record from a VHS tape. DVD software probably not at least until Mac OS X 10.1 which will have DVD support (then someone can port the DVD extraction software). For the hardware I've looked at some USB devices from Eskape Labs and a Firewire device from Formac. Either way I should wait a month or two until my credit card is paid off. So that means scanning pictures in, and I have a lot of those I can scan. Install the scanner drivers on Jennifer, since the Epson scanner I have is SCSI. Then organize and scan them in. It'll take a while and I'm not in any hurry, so I probably won't get around to it for another six months.

I realize that if it was my site, there's no way I would put up copyrighted pictures. (Well, "no way" is too strong a feeling; I would find it highly unlikely that I would do that.) But, if I'm going to do Tartan's site right I have to update it. So it's an outlet that I've finally come to terms with and that I'm more or less comfortable contributing to. It'll never be the greatest site in the world and I'm still not sure why Tartan did it. The HLOFCWS has a great section for photos and they used to have videos too, even before Tartan created his site. I don't know why people do the same old thing that's been done before. To me, if you can't make it original or your own in some way it's not worth it. But that's just me.